by Misty Simon
“He didn’t do it. I have extensive training in spotting a liar, and he was not lying. No dipping of the eyes, no slow blinking. He showed the appropriate emotions, and there was anger under that concern, not guilt. He wasn’t lying about Audra, either.”
“You know how to spot liars?” Dang. I would have to make extra sure I didn’t ever tell even a white lie. How was I going to hide Christmas presents from him if he asked what I had bought him?
“I can, Ms. Tallie Graver, so don’t forget it.”
I hugged his arm to me as the elevator door opened to the lobby. We stepped off and came face-to-face with Letty.
“Oh my God, I tried to call you after you texted about Bethany being in the hospital. I hustled over to see her. I got her flowers.” She held them out, as if I couldn’t see them. “I’m a horrible manager.”
“Knock it off, Letty. I didn’t get her anything, and I pretty much interrogated her while she lay in bed. I also warned her to let us know what happens from now on. Flowers are going to make her day. You’re a wonderful manager.”
Her shoulders fell from her ears a little. “Really?”
“Yes, really, and it’s not your job to keep track of everyone. This is a special circumstance. I’ve been trying to call her since yesterday. When I couldn’t find her, I decided to go to the one person who might know. You’ve been super busy, and you are the best manager ever. Don’t doubt that. Plus, you came right over with presents when you got my text.”
“Okay. I’m better. I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m good.”
“You are amazing. Now go take those flowers to her, and let me reimburse you from the company. I’d like them to be from all of us, if you don’t mind.”
“I already signed the card that way.” She grinned. “Good management material.”
“The best, and you deserve a raise as soon as Max figures out what our profit is. Make sure you turn in that receipt, or I’ll dock your pay.”
Now she laughed. “Thanks, Tallie. No matter what you think about yourself, you are the best boss ever.”
Max held the elevator door open until Letty had got on. We waved as the door closed, and then headed back to the car.
“You know she’s right and wasn’t lying at all,” Max told me. “You are good at what you do. Any more thought given to what you want to be when you grow up?”
“Honestly, I just want to solve this whole mansion thing, and then maybe I’ll give it some more thought. I really wanted to own a restaurant or a tea shop, but I get more pleasure out of driving the hearse and running this cleaning crew than I thought I would.” Oh crap. I had never told Max about the hearse-jacking.
“Something you’re not telling me?” he asked, pulling me aside as people streamed by to get to their various destinations.
“Um, no.”
“Yeah, lying. See right there? That twitch in your eye right there is a telltale sign that you’re not being honest with me. So spill. I’m not taking you home until you do.”
I sighed. This whole “telling lies” thing was going to be a problem. “Can we at least get something to drink while I tell you?”
“Café’s right through here.” He gestured to the door behind him, and the place was more of a cafeteria than a café, but it would suffice. And honestly, if we were going to talk about this, it was probably better done away from the funeral home, where my mom could accidentally hear something. And I didn’t want to talk about it in his truck, as he might swerve off the road.
We sat after getting to-go cups of coffee, and I told him about Preston and his soft-drink shenanigans.
“That doesn’t sound like a shenanigan to me. That sounds like something I want to beat the snot out of him for,” Max said when I was done.
“Oh, he’s not going to get away with it. Even if we find a different killer, he’s still going to get smacked with a charge for kidnapping. I’ll see to it.”
“Either you do or I will.”
“Down, boy. I’ve got this.”
He massaged my fingers and looked into my eyes. “I have never, nor will I ever, doubt that, but you’re going to have to put up with me wanting to protect you. Not in one of those ‘I am man’ ways, but more in the way that I care about you and don’t want anything ever to hurt you again.”
I laughed nervously. “Maybe the next time I have a hangnail, I’ll call you in DC, so you can come cut it off and yell at it for making me cry.”
“Or maybe I should just move up here, and then it won’t be an issue of a three-hour drive.”
God, was I ready to do this now, in a hospital cafeteria? Of course I was. If I could face down murderers and can-wielding idiots, then I could do this. “I would love that.”
“Really? No eye twitching.”
“No eye twitching, and really. I would love for you to move up here. I’ve been trying to think up a way to ask you, but I didn’t want to have to move down to DC just yet. And it felt wrong to ask you to uproot your life when, in the scheme of things, it would probably be easier for me to uproot mine.” I raised my shoulders and spread out my hands.
He grabbed my right hand back and kissed my knuckles. “Absolutely not. DC is just not ready for you. I don’t know if they’ll ever be, but here would be a perfect fit for me. I loved living here when I was younger, and it will be even better now with you.”
“We might want to think about getting a different place if you’re going to be here all the time. Cozy is one thing. Cramped is something altogether different.”
“Do you mind if I handle that? I have a few ideas. I’ll run it by you before it’s final, but I think I know the perfect place.”
The perfect place? That would be wherever he was, no matter how schmaltzy that sounded. However, the prospect of getting out of the funeral home and living with Max somewhere in town, but not that close to my parents, sounded divine.
“Surprise me,” I said, knowing I could trust him but hoping he knew what he was doing.
* * *
We made it back to the apartment and then split up to do some things. Max wanted to look into the properties again and see what old Mrs. P had up her sleeve with all these house sales, and I wanted to check in with Caleb. Instead of going back to the apartment complex, I decided to call him. He answered right away.
“I was hoping you might call,” he said.
That was not the usual response I got from people I was trying to get to trip themselves up, but I’d take it on this weird and wacky day of everything seeming to be different than I had originally thought. “What’s up?”
“I heard they took Preston Prescott into custody, and I just wanted to thank you for getting me out of the spotlight. I had a feeling he was the one who had proposed to her, because she kept crowing about some kind of yuppie guy. I kept thinking that maybe we could fix things and try again. That’s why I was frantic when I couldn’t find her. But I realized eventually that it wasn’t going to happen. She wanted to string him along until she got what she wanted. Mainly, to take over all your jobs and any new ones, and then she was going to drop him, and she wanted me to stay around until everything happened the way she wanted it to.”
“Is he the one who gave her the ring?”
“No. I think she gave that to herself, but I could never confirm it. She chuckled a few times about how his aunt was livid about him even considering marrying someone beneath him, but she got such a kick out of him squirming to keep dear old auntie happy while also trying to keep Audra happy.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” I asked, baffled. This could have helped me so much.
He shrugged. “I felt like an idiot and just wanted to get her killer found so I could get out of the spotlight. It felt like that information would just make you look harder at me.”
I shook my head at him. “I don’t think it would have, but that leaves another question. Why on earth did you stay, Caleb? You sound like a pretty smart boy, and you’re related to Letty, so you must actually be brilliant. Why on earth
wouldn’t you have left her earlier?”
“She was a manipulator, and I didn’t see that until the end. I think she was actually more of a narcissist, and it seemed fine, before she started gloating.”
“Do you think that was why she was killed? Because she was trying to manipulate people?” I had to ask.
“I don’t know, and before you ask, I swear it wasn’t me. I was trying to leave her and just wanted out. Not enough that I would have harmed her. I just wanted to walk away, and I was doing that. She was the one who couldn’t handle being walked away from.”
We signed off, because I really didn’t know what else to ask. I believed him, too, even though I didn’t have Max’s superpower of liar detection. But this also left me completely without any other clue and with nowhere else to go with all of this. Man, this sucked. I wanted to be able to find this killer and have him or her nailed to the floorboards.
But why couldn’t it be Preston? He was in the right place at the right time. He wouldn’t tell me what he had gone back to the mansion for, and he wouldn’t tell me when he’d gone back. So had he gone back and told Audra that with this housecleaning job having been given to her, they should now wed, and had she laughed at him? Told him that he had served his purpose and she was moving on?
“I have to go see Burton with all this,” I told Max. He sat on the floor, with Mr. Fleefers wrapped around his neck and Peanut trying desperately to fit herself into his lap. What an incredible life I had with those three. Yes, even Mr. Fleefers was wonderful, the darn cat.
“We’ll be here when you get back, and maybe we could do dinner. After that coffee, I realized how hungry I am. Is it okay if we order in instead of cooking?”
“Always. You don’t have to cook, though I love when you do, but ordering in is totally fine with me. Maybe we can discuss that kind of thing when I get back.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
Smiling, I headed out the door. My life was marching in a direction that I would never have guessed it would eighteen months ago, and I found myself extremely pleased with the twists and turns, which I had not realized I could love.
I even kept my smile as my mom tried to waylay me at the door, and I continued to smile as I decided to walk to the police station instead of get my car out from around the hearse, which had blocked me in again.
Walking along the sidewalk, I composed what I was going to say to Burton, and I gave careful thought as to how I would word my questions. I still didn’t have the murderer, but that would come soon enough. I was eliminating people left and right. I didn’t have anyone to fill in the gaps, but that would come. Some piece of evidence would snag me, and I would know exactly what to say and how to get the confession. I just knew it.
Not really, but that was what I was telling myself when a white cloth landed over my face and I passed out without another thought but Yikes.
Chapter Twenty-one
My first thought was that I was surrounded by the smell of the ocean. I didn’t know why that struck me as funny, but I snorted at my own laughter before clamping my hand over my mouth.
What the hell had just happened, and where in the world was I? This was not good.
I jerked around to find any piece of furniture or sight that looked familiar. Obviously, I was not in my house. I wasn’t in a hospital bed, like where Bethany had woken up. I wasn’t in any place I knew, except that my gaze landed on a picture frame that I knew I had seen before. I was in the house Mrs. Petrovski had sent us to clean after the mansion was closed down for the investigation, the one that was way too clean to need to be cleaned.
I thought about calling out, but then I realized that one of my feet was tied to the chair I was sitting on and that I was not going anywhere, unless I planned on hopping out of here with my hands tied in front of me and with a chair attached to my leg. Holy crap. So not good.
“Well, at least I got the dose right this time, unlike with that stupid employee of yours. I ended up having to hit her more than once to get her to drift off, and then I had to give her something a little special to make it all end.”
That voice. I knew it, and I did not like it one bit. It had told me I was worthless, and it wouldn’t let me speak when I had something to say. It had talked down to me, as if I was less, and ultimately, it had told tales that obviously were not true, which was a given if I was tied to a chair in her house and was just waking up from something like chloroform.
Mrs. Petrovski. How had she drugged me, then dragged me in here?
I closed my eyes, then opened them again, hoping that I would find myself in a different place, thinking that I had been having a nightmare of epic proportions.
But no, it was definitely real. The knot at my ankle was digging into my flesh, the one around my wrists was pulling at the fine hairs on my arms, and I was staring into the eyes of a madwoman. So not awesome.
“No words, Tallie Graver? Usually, you’re full of words and questions and too much information, but not enough smarts. So here we are. You had one job and one job only. To leave it to Burton to arrest my nephew and get him out of my life, and you couldn’t even do that right.”
“I—”
“No, don’t start talking now. Let me tell you a story, and then I’m going to have Jackson take you out and get rid of you.”
Jackson? I looked frantically around the room but saw no one else.
“He’ll be in after I’m done. I’m thinking about an even more special cocktail for you, one that will make you tell me all the things I want to know and then cause you to forget it all before Jackson’s turn.” She paced in front of me, with her heels and her pearls and her perfectly made-up face. She clicked across the room with the exactitude of a metronome, staring at me and then staring at her nails and then staring at me again. I was too scared to be bored this time. Whereas I had not feared Preston and his can of soda or his threats, this woman was altogether different and not the militant but manageable old lady I’d thought she was.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I said no questions, but I’ll answer that one, because it goes nicely with the little story I have to tell.” She paused and fingered the pearls at her neck. “Do you know what it takes to run an empire, Tallie?”
Was I supposed to answer that? I didn’t know what it took to run an empire. I couldn’t even think up a good name for my cleaning crew. But since she had said no talking, I just shook my head and waited for her to continue. I was going to have to start thinking of a way to get out of this predicament, long before Jackson came to do his duty.
“It takes a smart woman and an army of dumb guys. That’s what it takes.”
“Okay.”
“But then somehow I got an idiot of a nephew and no one to help me move to the next level and a cop who didn’t know when to look the other way.”
“Who should have looked the other way?”
She towered over me in a flash. “Burton. He was supposed to look the other way, over at my nephew. And he would have done it if you hadn’t taken Preston to jail and then tried to dupe me out of my perfect setup. You know, he might not have killed her, but I know for a fact he was the one who wrapped her up in that carpet and took her out to the Dumpster. Him and that woman he hired to work for Audra during the competition. I watched them do it from behind the half wall Bethany took a picture of, before I could close it, the dimwit.”
“What?”
“You see, there is a secret wall, but I couldn’t tell you that, or it would give away too many of my secrets, so I scoffed and I pooh-poohed and you believed me, you silly twit. The half wall isn’t where you thought it was, but it does exist. It’s there for me to use at my discretion.”
A light blinked on in my mind. “It’s that soft spot on the wall in the room upstairs, isn’t it?”
She smiled but didn’t answer my question. Instead, she continued her story. “Preston moved the body because he was afraid that if someone found her in the house, it wouldn’t sell, an
d if it didn’t sell, then he wouldn’t be able to buy into a little proposition that I’d asked one of my men to approach him with. It was brilliant, actually. I’d have him pay me through one of my goons, and he’d never know that the money he made was coming right back to me. Stupid man.”
“And what was the proposition?” I hadn’t come up with a way to get out of this, but I was fascinated by what she was saying.
“Drugs, my dear. A lot of lovely drugs. Burton shut me down without knowing who I was. I was selling all these properties to start up somewhere new, now that he was onto my staff of dealers. I killed that girl so he would look the other way while I made my escape, but you had to get involved and do your little nosy thing and then start interfering, and he didn’t take it as seriously as he needed to. I tried to encourage him to do his job, but why should he when he has an unpaid, stupid woman to go floundering around, trying to find clues for him like a little dog?”
Now, that was going too far. I was not little, and I wasn’t a dog. I puffed up my shoulders, because I really wanted to take a swing at her, even with my hands tied, and the chair moved a little. An idea started to form in my head, but I’d need to work out the logistics before I attempted it. Since she was still delivering her monologue, I felt I had a little time to get all the info I possibly could to nail her for all her crimes when I got out of this.
When, not if. When.
“And then my idiot of a nephew touched the corpse before I had a chance to dispose of it. And because he was so afraid of getting in trouble, as he’d left his fingerprints on her, and was also afraid that the house wouldn’t sell, he decided to throw her away and call a truck in to take her to the dump, so people would just figure she went missing. I almost killed him, too, that day, but when you found her, I decided he would be the perfect scapegoat.”
I scooted a little on the chair again and found that it was heavy but not too heavy. She walked away, and I scooted a little more. This was doable. All I needed to do was wait for her to get close to me again.
Frustratingly, she stayed out of reach while she delivered her next monologue. “My family has been running drugs for years. I took the small-time business and made it into something magnificent in the past few years, putting my education at Harvard behind it to make it bloom like no one had even conceived. But it all went downhill when Burton caught a whiff of what was happening in his little burg. I tried to get someone to pay him off to keep quiet, but he was having none of it, that ridiculous do-gooder. And then Preston started playing with that floozy and thought he’d marry her. We were not going to marry beneath us. We just don’t do that in this family. That’s why I never married. There was no one who was worthy of me.”
